Adobe RoboHelp: A Baffling Broken Link

Last week I was helping a colleague with a RoboHelp project she inherited. Part of what we did was fixing numerous broken links. After an hour or so all the broken links were fixed. Well, not entirely… One small link still held out against our efforts.

This link seemed to evade every effort made against it: I could not open the reference, I could not delete the reference, I could not edit the reference and I could not restore the reference. It has been quite some time since RoboHelp made me look a fool.

So I turned to the image of the reference for a clue. Unfortunately, the image was so small that I couldn’t make out what is was. Luckily, there still was MS Paint. I made a screen shot and used Paint to zoom in on the image. This was the result:

Wait, what? A cactus… With red squares? What does RoboHelp have to do with a thumbnail of a (badly) drawn desert? But the red squares made me think. I had seen those before: on an image map. And the bookmark that holds the broken link does start with ‘MAP’. So I opened the topic listed and what do you know: an image map.

The rest was easy: check all the links on the image map and fix the broken one. This broken link had me scratching my head for several minutes. I hope this post will help you whenever you encounter this ridiculous image.